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If you've been a reader in here for any length of time, you know that the Princess Amy, my sister-in-law, got engaged recently. As her fiance lives in Manhattan, it wasn't long before Amy was looking for a new job and subletting her apartment. She moved to NYC the second weekend in July.
This weekend, my father-in-law Jim had plans to go visit her. No, not in Manhattan, but in the weekend house they just purchased in the Hamptons because "Amy needs a place to escape the city."* It was a nice plan. Jim's birthday is Tuesday, so it was going to give him a chance to celebrate with them, and a chance to get to know Lon a little bit better before the wedding.
Now, all of a sudden, Betsy is part of the plan, too. According to the official story, Amy called her and asked her to come too because she's "homesick."
Why do I have a problem with this scenario? It breaks down to several reasons...
1. Amy never had time for anyone in her family while she lived here. In total, I can count the times she's seen Will in the almost nine months of his life on less than two full hands. She's always on the run, and impossible to pin down. On the rare occasion we made plans and she didn't cancel, whatever happened needed to be on her turf (hard to do with an infant) and in her timetable (again, baby accommodating her schedule--not easy to do). This is also what pisses me off when she talks about how much she "misses Will." Yeah, 'cause this is so different from when you were here...But I digress...
2. Jim never gets anything of his own. Betsy HAS to upstage him. She HAS to get her foot in the door. She HAS to be a part of it. And then, once she's there, it HAS to happen on her terms. She becomes in charge. And she's a terrible planner. I wondered for a long time why the Husband eats his dinner compartmentally--all the meat, then all the veggies, then all the rice--but now I realize it's because how dinner in their house was always served. Whatever finished cooking first went on the plate, with the next thing to follow, and so on. There's an art to dinner, and she ain't got it. But everything in her life is like that, so why am I surprised? But again--I digress...
3. Jim has no balls. Now, I don't mean literally--thankfully, I have no way to know that. But his years with Betsy have so totally emasculated him that he can't say to her, "Make your own damn plans--this is my weekend!" He's getting a little bit more forceful now that my mom and I are around and he feels he has allies, but it's still a passive-agressive sort of commenting instead of a full-force standing up for himself. I really like my father-in-law, but I want to give him a backbone. Nobody loves a doormat, Jim, unless she's got dirty shoes, and then you just end up with a bad taste in your mouth.
Yep, that's me, on the "I wish I'd married an orphan" bus.
It's hard, because the Husband SO wants me to have a good relationship with his mom, and he pushes for it and tries to sneakily push us together. But it will never, ever work. She saw to that when she refused to talk to me about the New Year's Eve Incident. She slammed that door shut, and I will NOT work to reopen it. It's like in Monsters, Inc., when the doors go through the chipper. You can't go home again.
I have vowed that I will always be pleasant to her face and that I will never speak ill of her to Will. I think asking for any more than that is unreasonable. But that's just me.
On a totally different note, I skipped out of watching John Edwards' speech last night so I could see the second episode of Rescue Me because I heart Denis Leary. I think I made the right choice...
*I don't begrudge them the weekend home. I don't care how many houses they have. I'm not jealous. I just hate listening to her talk out of one side of her mouth about all the stuff they're buying and the $50k wedding they're planning, and out of the other side about how poor they are. Sweetheart, I've hit a point where either diapers or dinner are going to fit into our budget. I think Teresa Heinz Kerry might have a couple words for what you can do with your poor talk.
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